


Bad Influence

by Clarebear



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 23:24:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8033062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clarebear/pseuds/Clarebear
Summary: Lip and Karen before they became Lip and Karen





	Bad Influence

Even when he was happy, Lip looked like a boy whose puppy dog had just died. It was something about the heaviness in his eyes—hooded and hopeless and sad—and the pout of his lips. It took Karen two months of knowing him in the seventh grade before she ever saw him look happy.

“So you can smile after all,” she said, passing him the cigarette, even though it was more a smirk than a smile, and it had faded in less than a second.

“I guess,” Lip said, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. They leaned against the brick wall of school near track fields, sharing a cigarette from the pack that Lip had lifted off their English teacher.

Karen hadn’t smoked before she met Lip.

She hadn’t done a lot of things.

She leaned over him to take the cigarette from his hand. She wore a new push-up bra and a t-shirt that showed it off, and she angled herself to make sure that Lip noticed it as well.

She felt his eyes on her as she lifted the cigarette to her lips.

“Are you flirting with me?” Lip asked, watching her.

The way the late afternoon sunlight hit him made his eyes looked unnaturally blue.

Karen exhaled the smoke, and it was her turn to fight a small smile. “I guess,” she said. She let her head rest back against the wall, her eyes drifting closed as she lifted her face to the sun.

***

“You don’t have many friends,” she told him, walking beside Lip after Social Studies on a Friday in October. The walls were covered with green and white signs for the football game that night. The players wore their home jerseys. Lip wore the same shirt he’d worn the past three days.

“And you don’t have many manners.” Lip stopped at his locker. “It’s a bit early in the morning for social shaming, don’t you think?”

Karen leaned her shoulder against the locker beside him. “Are you going to the game tonight?”

“What do you think?”

“That you should come,” Karen said, watching him. When he finished fetching the books for his next classes out of his locker without speaking, she added, “I’ll be there.”

Lip shut the locker door and turned the combination. He looked at her, glancing downward at her cheerleading uniform. She had requested a size too small so her belly button showed.

“I figured,” he said.

Someone walking past knocked into Karen's shoulder, pushing her into him. She barely caught her balance before she heard a crash. Lip had shoved the eighth-grader who bumped into her into the locker, his hands gripping the collar of his football jersey to hold him there.

“Apologize,” Lip said.

The football player shoved him. “Fuck off, Gallagher.”

Lip slammed him back against the locker again, the boy’s head banging against the metal with a clang.

“Apologize,” Lip said again.

“Lip, don’t,” Karen said, even though she didn’t mean it. Her heart raced in her chest.

“I aint saying shit, you white trash piece of Gallagher garbage.”  

It took two teachers and a janitor to separate them.

After school, as her dad watched TV and her mother baked scones in the kitchen, Karen lay on her bed and, for the first time, reached her hand beneath the waistband of her cheerleading skirt. She closed her eyes as she explored with her fingers, and replayed what Lip looked like with blood welling on his lip and an edge of anger in those broken blue eyes.

***

“Three days, huh?”

“It was my first offense,” Lip said, stooping to pick up a beheaded doll in the Gallagher front yard. Fiona had given him extra weekend chores as punishment for being suspended. “Next time, they said it would be two weeks.”

Karen stood with her arms wrapped around her stomach. It was cold—fall wind coming off of Lake Michigan—and she was dressed in shorts and a low-cut tank top. She wanted to look her best when she came to see Lip.

“Michael Green was benched for the next three games,” she said. “The guy you beat up.”

Lip glanced over his shoulder as he dumped a bunch of toy cars and action figures into a cracked Rubbermaid bin. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?”

Karen shrugged. “Just telling you.”

Lip continued working his way through the clutter in the yard. Watching him, Karen felt stupid, standing in the patchy grass wearing skimpy clothes while Lip barely looked at her. What did she think was going to happen?

“Well,” she said. “I just came to say hi. I guess I’ll see you when you’re back at school.”

Lip nodded, squinting at her. He reached into his pocket and for his pack of cigarettes. He lit one. “See you,” he said.

Karen reached down to pick up the half-burnt Barbie doll she was standing on. “Nice,” she said, looking down at it. She walked over to drop it into the plastic bin.

“My kid brother’s,” Lip explained. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what type of psychopath he is.”

Karen went to take the cigarette from his fingers.

“I thought you were leaving?” Lip said, watching her take a drag.  

“I was. I changed my mind.”

She stood close enough that Lip needed to look straight down at her. His gazed fixed for a second too long on the curves of her chest that rose above her tank top. Karen gazed up at him. Please, she thought, although she didn’t know what she was asking for.

“You’ve got goosebumps,” Lip said. He turned, and motioned his head toward the house. “Want to come inside? Yard will be fucked again by tomorrow anyway.”

***

The kitchen looked like a daycare. Clutter littered every surface. Half-eaten food, dirty dishes, papers and clothes and a hundred other brightly-colored items with no point besides filling space. Karen stepped over a discarded toy shopping cart that lay sideways in the linoleum entryway.

“This is Karen,” Lip said to the kids that clustered around the kitchen. “Karen, this is everyone. We’re going to my room.”

As she walked up the stairs behind Lip, her legs feeling strangely unsteady, Karen struggled for something to say. “So, those are all your siblings?”

Lip nodded. “That’s what they tell me.”

Karen thought of her antiseptic house with its plastic couch covers and fake floral arrangements. Of her bland father and her psychotic robot of a mother, her dysfunctional excuse of a Stepford family. So this is what it was like to grow up in a real house?

Lip shared a room with his brothers. The beds were unmade. Clothes covered every inch of the floor, posters every inch of the wall, and the smell that lingered was a mix of weed smoke and sweat and something oddly musky.

Lip sat down on one of the beds, and watched as she surveyed the room. Karen leaned over to look at a photo frame that sat atop a cluttered nightstand. A gaggle of kids, one with a mop of gold hair and faraway eyes. He wasn’t smiling.

Karen turned it to him. “Is this you?” she asked, even though she knew it was.

“Do you get off on this?”

Karen set down the picture frame. “What?”

Lip was looking her in the way he did, like she was a math problem that the teacher had written on the board and he was solving the equation in his head.

“This. My family. The whole Gallagher thing. Does it get you off to be slumming it with one of us?”

“ _Slumming_ it? I live five blocks away. It’s not like I live in the fucking Trump tower.”

“Don’t fucking do that. It’s different and you know it.”

“How?”

Lip shook his head. He leaned over to drop the finished cigarette into an empty beer can beside his bed. “You’re already the blonde cheerleader with perky tits and a crush on the neighborhood punk. It’s way too sad of a cliché to add ‘playing dumb’ to the mix, don’t you think?”

Karen stared at him. She didn’t know if she felt more embarrassed or angry at this new Lip who was suddenly being an ass to her for no reason, or if it made her want him more.

She swallowed. “Who said I have a crush?”

Lip raised an eyebrow. He leaned back, supporting his weight with his elbows against the mattress, and gave a small nod in her direction. “Take your shirt off.”

It took Karen a long time to realize she was holding her breath. She finally found enough of her voice to manage, “What?”

“You heard me.” Lip looked at her, his expression as mild as always. He didn’t seem to care one way or another what happened.

“No,” Karen said.

Lip shrugged in the one-shouldered way of his. “Fine,” he said. But he kept gazing at her.

Karen heard herself speak. “You take off yours.”

For a few moments, Lip didn’t move. Then he slowly sat up straight again. He lifted his arms over his head, and watched her expectantly.

Karen had to take a few steps forward to reach him. When she dropped the shirt on the floor, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with her hands.

Before she could figure it out, Lip was pulling up on the hem of her tank top, coaxing it over her head. He stayed seated on the edge of the bed. His hands were cool as he slid them up the bare skin of her back, around to her stomach before his thumb and fingers settled on either side of her hips. Holding her still, he leaned forward and brushed his lips against the bare skin above her bellybutton.

Karen needed to catch a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. The muscles in her stomach jumped. A million goosebumps flooded down her body. Her head felt like she was going to faint, like all the blood had rushed from her brain to pool in her middle.

Lip said something as he moved his mouth to another part of her stomach, lower, and this time he was truly kissing her, warm and wet, with tongue, before moving lower still. Karen realized she was clutching his shoulder, her nails curled in, and at the same time she made sense of what he had asked her. “Are you on the pill?”

Karen nodded, her mind blank, her free hand finding the curls at the back of Lip’s neck as she felt him brush his nose along the line of skin that followed the waistband of her shorts. “Yeah,” she lied.

“Take these off,” Lip said, tugging lightly at the pocket of her jean shorts. Lip leaned back again onto his elbows to watch, gazing up at where she stood in her underwear and bra.

Karen wasn’t shy about her body. She knew exactly how she looked. But the way Lip studied her, his expression unreadable, made her feel uncertain and young. Much younger than he was, even though their birthdays were only a month apart.

Finally Lip spoke, shaking his head. “It’s too bad,” he said.

“What?”

“That you don’t have a crush on me. I think the sex would have been pretty good.”

At the look Karen gave him—one of disbelief and furious embarrassment—Lip threw himself back in bed and laughed. Not just any laugh, one so full of joy and genuine amusement that by the time that Karen attacked him with her hands, slapping and hitting him, she was smiling as well.

“You asshole!” She pounded at his bare shoulder with her fist. “You arrogant. Gallagher. prick.”

“Stop,” Lip laughed, trying to catch her flailing hands. “Stop.” He had to trap her arms to her sides, dragging her down beside him and rolling her beneath his body weight to keep her restrained. “Stop,” he said again, more softly, and when he shifted above her in a purposeful motion, Karen felt herself immediately go still.

The mirth slowly faded from Lip’s eyes as he held himself levered over her, and he became the solemn version of himself again. It was so quiet that Karen could hear the voices of his siblings downstairs.

“I want you,” Lip said, and he kept the hardness in his jeans pressed against her hip so she knew he wasn’t lying. “You get that, right?”

Karen felt herself nod. You’re not like any other boy at school, she thought stupidly, staring up at him. You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met.

She couldn’t keep herself from swallowing. “So then…Why can’t we….?”

It wasn’t quite a smile, the smirk that tugged up at the corner of Lip’s mouth, but he looked over his shoulder to hide it anyway. He brushed a hand beneath his nose and turned back to her with his familiar lack of expression.

“What, have sex?”

“I’m not here to play Jenga,” Karen said.

Lip smiled for real at that, an actual grin. It made Karen’s cheeks feel oddly hot, and she found herself looking away. 

Lip rolled his weight off her, wriggling his shoulders a bit to so he could fit flat between her body and the wall. Karen shifted slightly so she could place her hands on her bare stomach. The places where his body touched hers—the skin of his arm pressed against hers—felt very hot.

Speaking to the ceiling, Lip said, “Sex fucks things up, no matter how much people say it won’t. It’s just how it is. You’re my best friend.”

Karen turned to look at him. “Lip,” she said. “I’m your only friend.”

He breathed out through his nose and sat up. “I know,” he said. Rolling over her, he got out of bed. Karen propped her head on her elbow to watch as he picked his shirt up from where she had dropped it on the floor. Once he had fought his hands through the armholes and straightened it around his waist, he said, “That’s why I don’t want to ruin this.”

He stooped to swipe her tank top and shorts off the carpet, tossing them at her with an overhand throw. “Let’s go downstairs. And for the love of god, please cover your tits before I change my mind.”


End file.
